


in painter's light

by rainbowagnes



Category: Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, And Jordan (and Hennessy) And Declan Meet as Children, Art, Art Forgery, Belfast, Bisexuality, Coming of Age, Declan Stays With His Mother, Dublin (City), Majorca, Multi, Organized Crime, Somewhat Nonlinear narration, Tags/ships/characters added as relevant to story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:33:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28344690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: Age 18, and Declan Ó Corra knows that if his father wasn't dead he'd resurrect him from the grave just to kill the bastard himself. AU
Comments: 25
Kudos: 63





	in painter's light

**Author's Note:**

> SO. This is my first attempt at a multichapter in years, and the first attempt ever where I have a full on Story- a plotted story!, mind you- to try to finish. It's also born of my realisation that as a writer, I've written many short things and little scenes but very little with a Plot of my own invention, and then somehow, the question of where the story might have gone if Declan had stayed with his mother, and if Jordan and Declan had met earlier, wouldn't leave my mind. I also really wanted to explore Jordan's story from her own perspective more. On that, Stay Tuned!
> 
> A few notes before we start:  
> 1)I cannot yet give a strict list of trigger warnings for following chapters as i'm still making executive decisions about what to include and what not to include, but I would recommend to please watch this opening comments space as chapters are posted and more specific trigger warnings are added. Organised crime and violence, and the effect of both will remain themes throughout. 
> 
> On that note, if there are issues or anything that cause discomfort (for lack of a better word. THis whole paragraph is a strung together series of lacks of better words) lmk in the comments or on my tumblr @tovezza. also ditto for irishisms and later, (london) anglicisms that are spotty. i'm a transatlantic transplant to these isles as a teenager so it's a bit of a mess. 
> 
> 2) This has been given an M rating out of the idea that it's preferable to rate higher than lower, especially on something at least partly based on a YA novel, and in which for a good section, the characters are underage. Rest assured, there will be nothing spicier than what's in the following chapter, or depictions of actual sex scenes, but a fair amount of considerations about teenage sexuality, and what happens before and after sex. So. Heads up. 
> 
> 3) Writing Playlist here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5eRps0a9YOgtyVQfaUhHqQ?si=X35EtDs4SMWt6svoQP-0rw  
> Alternately just listen to Dermot Kennedy's entire discography. don't @ me. the title itself however comes from a song of the same name by Declan O'Rourke, which I found completely accidentally while hunting for an actual Declan playlist but which contained a number of Feelings. 
> 
> MASSIVE shoutout to Sri @priyatama and @herrlichersonnigertag for beta'ing the first chapter so far and providing very helpful feedback! i literally could not have gotten this to the state it's in without you! and loaf you both

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place in like 2016 idk i can’t do math please ignore the reference to the irishman bening anachronistic something about the universe where declan stayed with his mother caused the chain reaction of the irishman coming out before 2016 that’s the butterfly effect SUCKERS  
> There are so many characters that will not return i’m so sorry. The relevant ones are: Declan, Jordan, Mór, his grandmother, and briefly, Aisha and Oisín. for my editor anna sophia YES i think mariella must now make a reappearance

Age eighteen, Declan Ó Corra knows several things: 

1) If you’re going to go for an Ulster Fry, it better be a fucking Ulster Fry, and it better glisten with grease. Anything less is a shame. 

2) Eating pussy and sucking cock are not precisely the same skill but they have some similar results, and while both have the makings of a fun night in, neither are the foundations for any kind of relationship when you can’t tell the date in question anything about why you’re gone every second thursday or where the blood on your shirt came from.

3) Technically, it shouldn’t be worth forging a painting made before1945, when an atom bomb threw so much radioactive shit into the atmosphere it shows up in paint, but the reality is everyone wants older paintings and doesn’t want to pay what they cost and is willing to overlook a few key checks to acquire them. Thus the fake fucking Picassos and Pollocks and Sargents he and his mam have passed off to three members of the Dáil, two parliament Tories, a washed up rock star who’s philanthropist credentials went to hell with the Panama papers, the mistress of a triple Bafta winner, and a chair on the European Ag Commission are all not only fake as shit but blatantly so, and he doesn’t feel all that bad about it either, radioactive paint from a twenty-first century Tindalls and all. For a kid who grew up fucking around the underworld filth of the Fairy Market, all of Declan’s more egregious sales have taken place in well lit back rooms in Sotheby’s, with twee little tea trolleys and well-locked doors. 

4) Caol le caol agus leathan le leathan.

5) People at film criticism clubs do not actually watch the films they criticise. They binge watch Hannibal and Love Island off Netflix and then when the meeting comes round they throw out canned phrases about the post Fruedian dialectic of materialism and have a kind of intellectual circle jerk. Declan can play this game very well, especially since about half the time, he actually watches the film. The true purpose of a film criticism club is to find a reasonably fit ride, who you will then then awkwardly argue about Pasolini with next week. (Refer to point 2.) 

6) He loved her. He loved her. He hadn’t known what love of this kind was, exactly, but he had it for her. Neither of them had seen that kind of love well enough up close to have an authenticated sample type to match themselves to, and while that had probably been part of the problem of the disaster that was Declan’s first great romance, he himself had been the biggest part of it. Her blamed her, but he didn’t, but he blamed himself the most. 

7) If his father wasn’t dead, he’d resurrect him from the grave just to kill him himself. 

\---o0o--- 

Mór waits for him, leaning against the entrance to their flat, bottle with pinkish-gold foil swinging between her fingers. It surprises him slightly, though not much. They have evolved into a relationship too mutually autonomous to be called codependent, but rather made of interlocking sets, united in certain equations. Declan thinks it suits him niceley, though it still always surprises him a bit when she appears into his life from nowhere, trailing a bit of the world after her. A prosecco bottle with the label actually entirely written in Italian, rather than just a line or two for luxurious effect, per esempio. She passes it to him. 

“Managed to make it to eighteen without knocking anyone up or dropping out of school. Sláinte. L’Chaim. Cheers to your lack of responsibility.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” he says, and unlocks the door. He’s about to hunt around for glasses when she whacks him lightly on the shoulder. 

“Were you raised by wolves? The only way to get sloshed on a post-exams eighteenth is to drink straight from the bottle.” 

Feeling slightly embarrassed, as if he’s a child being told off for tramping muddy wellies across the nice clean floors, Declan grabs the bottle from her, twists the cap off, lets it foam over his hands, lukewarm and sticky. He takes a long swig and lets the sweetness and alcohol fizz through his veins. Is this what celebration feels like? He’s spent most of the last week neatly organising the notes he thought might still be useful in uni, dealing with some of Mór’s domestic business with a creditor, going on ridiculously long walks around the city, and trying not to think about what he had planned to do this summer, and who he had planned to do it with. Idleness does not come easily,or feel like a reward when it does.

“Eighteen,” Mór says again. He can see her fingers twitching on the marble counter, in the way she used to look for a cigarette and has been fighting the last few years. “Emancipated adult you are now.” 

“Don’t even have to use a fake ID at the pub anymore. Not that a drop of alcohol has ever passed these lips, Mam. Outside of Mass, of course.” 

Declan has a voice that is dry in the way that means people usually have a hard time telling sincerity from taking the piss. There are a limited group of people who can tell the difference. 

“You’re such a fucking square,” she says affectionately, ruffling his hair. “Graduating Senior Cycle and everything. Top marks on the Leaving Cert.” She grabs the bottle back from him. “First one in the family to get into Uni and it’s fucking Trinity. How did you manage that?” 

There is almost something like wonder in her voice. He doesn’t say the obvious, which is that he’d worked like hell, but also that he came from a family that all the way down the generations has worked like hell, and the only thing different about where he is and where she’d been were privileges of geography, class, money, and the untimely setback that been the arrival of he, himself. So instead he says: 

“Art history. That’s how I managed it. For art history. I just talked about Carvaggio for half an hour to one of the toffs in admissions.” 

“Right. You told your Gran yet?”

“Of course.”

“About Trinity?” 

“Yeah.” 

“But not about the art history?” 

“If she knew I was wasting my shot at curing cancer or becoming a lawyer and taking up the cause of the international proletariat to write essays about Baroque cathedrals, she’d kill us both.” Desiring to remain in the happy, buzzy alcohol-y feeling, he digs around for a glass in the press and then pours himself a generous few fingers of vodka from the Smirnoff bottle on the counter. Playing go-between in the domestic civil war between his mother and grandmother usually required more tact than anything in the Fairy Market or even that he’d come across in shadowing their rep in the Dáil. He doesn’t tell her what his Grandmother really said over spring break, what bearings she’s had on his life decision making, give the way Mór questions whatever her own mother touches. 

“When do you leave for Mallorca?” 

“Got to be at the airport at six tomorrow.” 

“Busy boy. You’ve earned it. How’s work experience this summer going?” 

He stares at the vodka in his glass, which is suddenly reminding him of less pleasant things, hospital wards, the places you go when you have a gunshot wound that can’t be taken to a hospital ward without a national news story breaking. This is how it always is with his mother: she is brutally direct, except when she isn’t. Speaking the cant of their profession, questions twisted into other questions. 

“Allright. The other plans fell through. Should have time.” 

She nodded slowly. “Go, have a laugh- forget it. Then when you come back, we’ll talk. They say the sun does wonders to clear up questions.” 

\---- 

All his life, Declan has been chronically prompt, even when he knows that other people are going to be late. He gets to the airport early, checks his bag, buys an oat milk latte from the Costa and this week’s Economist, and is halfway through the feature article about the myriad complexities of dairy regulation in the Eurozone before Jamie and Connor and Alex show up, already slightly red faced from the alcohol they’ve clearly drunk on the Uber ride over. Declan sighs in a way that cannot be perceived by other human beings. 

He might as well have factored the cost of rescheduling a missed flight into his budgeting for the trip, just as he might as well buy a duty free Bacardi shot on the other side of security, time permitting, or else none of the others’ jokes will be funny. It’s all a lot of work to have fun, and the small part of him that can admit loneliness battles with the larger part of him that says this is all so much work and money, for something supposedly relaxing, that the trip he would choose for himself would be far more adult and staid, the kind of thing that would sound downright embarrassing for a teenager to admit out loud- a cheap motel, long days walking through some sun-drenched mediterranean city, sketching in air-conditioned galleries and reading long books in al fresco cafes with wrought iron tables. Alone. Aloneness a heavy comfort on his shoulders, like shrugging on a familiar jacket before you leave the house. 

But maybe this is also his problem- that he has spent an unusual amount of time alone, and has become too accustomed to the taste. All Declan really knows is that it feels as if in all his long evenings spent memorising endless rules for the dative case and inverse tangents he’d lost a sheet that said: these are the rules for how to be a person. And now here he was, perpetually behind on the homework, lost like the student in class who never did the reading everyone else had revised. Was this how all people felt, all the time? Declan is starting to think that’s the case, but hopes not. 

“Decks!” Connor shouted, and Declan waved animatedly, perhaps too much. He pulled his arm down.  
“All right, eh?” Jamie already sounds kind of drunk.

“Aye, alright. Ready to get this show going now. Forget everything that’s happened. Have some fun.” 

Something in Connor’s eyes flashes mercurially. He was rich and disinterested, and this was what made him an ideal friend. Rich enough and connected enough to know the right sorts for Declan to be shaking hands with. Disinterested enough not to be dangerous, which was good, but also disinterested enough to be careless in a way that had Declan constantly on edge. 

“Not much for you to forget there, mate, is there now? Heard you got fourth from top in the year on the Cert.” 

Connor has not told him his results. Declan suspects that unless a serious donation is made in the family name, he will not be continuing to enjoy the regular presence of Connor’s company in uni. Alex is going to a big city uni in the states, Jamie to a British Russell Group. It provides a safety net to their acquaintance, the specific date of its practical expiration. 

“I did, yeah.” He has the distinct impression he is supposed to be apologising to Connor for something, though how, he doesn’t know. “Why don’t we head on from here, yeah? Or we’ll miss the flight. All’s well that ends well and all.” 

\---o0o--- 

Going through security, Declan’s phone rings. He checks the messages. Two from his mam, one a gif of a fruity drink with a miniature parasol. One from Oisín. He’s on vacation. He turns it off. 

It rings on the plane. Declan puts it on airplane mode and orders tea and vodka from the trolley, and then downs three antacids from his pocket, trying to forget how much he hates flying. 

It has nineteen missed messages when he gets off the plane, and he makes the executive decision to do something he has never done before, not in his entire life, which is to keep it on airplane mode, and enjoy his vacation. They grab their bags and get an uber to their rental, and then go for lunch near the water and drink some more. Declan leaves his phone in the rental when he goes to the beach and gets absolutely sunburned for the first time in years. He doesn't check it when he splashes his way into the water and thinks for just a second what it would be like for it to swallow him forever. Not in a suicidal way. He’s a greedy bastard who likes his life slightly too much for that. Just disappearing. Being a part of the peace. But then he breaks the water and sees his friends down the coastline, sharking some other girls out on break, probably the only kind of sharks around for kilometres these days, global warming and all. He leaves them to it. 

They go back. His head is starting to hurt from more alcohol than he’s had since It happened, neatly splitting his young adulthood into before and after sections, with a neat few liquor-nothinged weeks between. They’ll go out clubbing tonight, arrangements already being hashed out about bringing girls back. Declan pauses momentarily doing up his shirt. If he does bring anyone back, it’ll be girls. He’s spent so long regulating his own mind to say dates, to say people, to say hookups or shifts without a specification of gender, to feel comfortable in this section of his own skin that it feels strange to be walking backwards down that road, but it’s also something you can become used to, like anything else. Flirting with men usually brought a reaction neither comparable nor fully dissimilar to answering a phone call in Irish in a pool of English people- an awkward disconnect between the stated liberal fineness with the idea, when it was other people, and the twitchy discomfort when it was another version of the person in front of you.

He turns his phone on. The first thing is an Instagram update from Aisha’s account. She’s posted a story of herself and a group of girlfriends table dancing in a purple flashing room, tagged Aiya Napa. “Shout Out to my Ex” has been superimposed over the club music. He puts his phone back on airplane mode. 

\---o0o--- 

“We’re all booked out.” 

The waitress looked at them boredly. The original plan had been to hit the club immediately, but the plane and sun must have fucked up their body clocks enough that it’s far too early when they arrive, the clubs properly dead or not even open yet, so Declan suggests they get dinner. 

“C’mon,” Jamie says. “Looks like shite anyway.” 

It looks like one of the entire string of restaurants along the waterfront, but with preferable food, so Declan holds his ground. 

“I’m not even hungry-” Connor sighs, and Declan sighs internally, because what Connor wants is the nucleus around which the group inevitably shifts. 

“Un moment, senyoreta, si us plau” he begins. The waitress looks surprised. “Potser,” he continues in Catalan, “it would be possible for us to stand at the bar or eat at a table with the promise we will be done in an hour? There is a great tradition, of course, to the long mediterranean meal but-” he gestured at his friends, “unfortunately we are not near sophisticated enough to appreciate, and will be quickly done.”  
She looks at him with a slightly slack jawed expression. He gives a winning debate-final smile. 

“Is that supposed to impress me?” 

“No. I only want to make clear the situation, between we, the cultured.” He gestures to indicate his companions are not included in this categorisation. “I can discuss the situation in Spanish, or Italian, if you would prefer.” 

“Catalan is fine. I will see what can be done.” 

It takes them five minutes to get seated. 

“I have hoped that a patio table will be sufficient for you,” she tells Declan. She’s testing him, he knows, moving quickly and switching between complicated tenses, and he’s long past his breaking past, guessing based on cognates and contexts. “What is it you would enjoy, tonight?” 

It’s nowhere near close enough for night for a line like that. Local kids are probably eating their after school snack right now. He looks at her for a long moment, parses the decisively singular tu form, far from the plural, waiterly vostè and makes a judgement call. 

“That sounds perfect. I cannot judge my friends preferences, but” He pauses. “Una carta 

i una copa de vi negre. You know what they say about red wine, the way it sharpens the skills de la llengua.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Good. Your grammar needs it.” 

\---o0o--- 

“-And now she’s off to fucking Manchester,” Connor winds off a long story. “To do English of all fucking things. She knew I’d not pass the leaving cert with how shite that school is, no matter how fucking much my father pays for it, and she’s still gone off. Tell you, they’re fixing the exams these days against men like us.” Connor’s halfway through an Estrella Damm, which has improved his mood considerably, so far as his mood can be improved. He’s paradoxically usually happiest in the midst of a story bemoaning his own misfortune, which is usually at the hands of numerous bad actors. 

“Really fucking sorry,” Jamie commiserates. 

“Tragic,” Declan says, trying to focus his eyes on Connor and not the waitress. 

“None of us can pull like him, eh? Decks must have shifted his way through half the film club by now.”

Declan laughs into his hand. He’s only found one serious date via the film criticism club, and that was because the shitbrained organiser had made the executive decision to spend the spring term doing an in depth dive into the oeuvre of a single auteur in order to explore artistic progression, that auteur being Martin Scorsese. Watching a dozen films made by Martin Scorsese is an experience rather like banging one’s head into a wall, made up for only by an equally bored American on a gGap year who’d been sorted into Declan’s discussion group and transpired to be far more interested in exploring the workings of an Irishman than The Irishman. His name was Asher and he was from America and either wealthy enough or willing to splash around money enough - Declan’s burgeoning career has well taught him to mind the difference - to have gotten a rental car, which he took on various kinds of road trips, and in which they met. Very little other information was exchanged. Maybe he actually was very wealthy. Gap years are like a knowledge of Classics: things that signify an entirely different bracket of wealth coming from an American. 

Declan doesn’t quite know why he kept going on seeing Asher just like he didn’t know why he keeps going to film criticism club or why he keeps dating people at all. 

“Not quite, mate.” 

“What’s your secret? I never even see you on the pull.” 

“I don’t go on the pull.” This is mostly true. 

“What attracts them to your magnetic personality, then, mate?” 

“Talent. It’s a skill, mate. Either you have it or you don’t.” 

“Yeah,” Jamie cuts in. “You get ‘em but you don’t keep ‘em. Gotta admire the spirit.” 

The alcohol suddenly feels like it’s caught up to him, sloshing around in his mind. This is also probably true. In the six months since Jordan he’s managed to date an Asher, an Aisha and on Oisín, the latter two of whom Declan knows are perfectly lovely and smart and funny and might have gone further in the strange other world where Declan isn’t always standing on the precipice of what might happen if anyone gets too close to his mother’s business to be burned. and so he laughs it off and blames the curse of names with vowels and -sh sounds as if what was cursed all along isn’t him. 

“Since when do you know Catalan?” Connor asks, looking vaguely suspicious. Declan shrugs. For all that he is sure of nothing so much as that he knows nothing at all, he’s a repository of strange skills and hobbies, most of which get carefully hidden away. Catalan is one of the more explicable ones, Spotify podcasts downloaded to fill his empty apartment with some kind of noise, Duolingo. Like coasting, after his H1 in Irish. Another cousin to the Spanish and Italian he already knows, already worn comfortable with practice. There was a Fairy Market in Barcelona in a house quite literally dreamed up by Gaudi, dragons’ bones for windowsills and tiled interiors that breathed and heaved underfoot and spiraled on in fractals, endlessly.. Everything both made of mosaics and green-burnished copper and undoubtedly, virulently alive underhand. Jordan would have loved it, he’d thought. It would have creeped the shit out of her, but she would have loved it. 

“Picked it up.” 

“I feel like I don’t know you, sometimes.” 

“I don’t think I really know myself, to be honest.” 

Connor takes a much longer swig of beer. “Feel like that’s the truest shit you’ve ever told me.” 

\---o0o--- 

He doesn’t check his messages when their food comes. He doesn't’ check his messages when he finds the note scrawled on the napkin under his plate. He doesn’t check his messages when he makes a flimsy story about needing to go back to rest and heads out past the kitchens to where the hostess from earlier is waiting, now in a red football jersey and skinny jeans. She really is extremely pretty, a massive amount of curly hair only somewhat tied up so the rest falls around her face in ringlets, like an Edwardian painting. 

“My name’s Mariella,” she says. “Want to go someplace else?” 

He doesn’t check his messages when they do, when they take a break from the drinking for him to buy them both an ice cream and for them to walk along watching the water. At some point he can’t tell they switch from his halting Catalan to far better Spanish. It’s easy talking to her, as it often is, talking to strangers who expect nothing and he will probably never see again.  
“Do you have plans? For the future?” 

“Archaeology. Maybe. Probably gonna end up teaching eleven year olds Geography with a degree like that, but.” She shrugs. “Guess that’s the case for the humanities these days.”

“I’m going to study Art History, so I can’t give you the self-law-student “you’re-wasting-your-life guilt trip” about that.” He tips the ice cream container sideways, to drink the last of the melting sludge, and crumples it to toss in the bin. “What do you like about it? I mean, of course, if you want to. It’s tricky to answer things like that sometimes, you know? Like when someone asks you what your favorite book is, and you forget every book you’ve ever read.” 

She smiles. “Yeah, exactly like that. I don’t know all of it, maybe. I liked history but I always also liked chemistry and maths, you know? Things with numbers and graphs. I always liked history, but reading it, I thought, where is the person like me in it? Where is my mother? Where are the girls who get menus for bratty Irish boys in restaurants, where are they in the chronicles of kings? And then there was an open day at MAC, and they showed us a skeleton, and I thought that was disgusting, at first, wrong, but they showed us all these bits of her under the microscope. Like relics, almost. And they told us all these things they’d learned about her, how she’d been born in Valencia but moved north as a teenager and she’d given birth and probably made money and then lost it due to the layers in her teeth, and I thought, for most of us, that’s what we’d be in history. This is the kind of history I am, right there, and there was something so beautiful about it. The record of ordinary bones and houses and things, here on this land, forever.” She trailed off. “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry for talking so long. Am I boring you? Don’t let me bore you.” 

“Don’t be boring. I was enjoying it. Keep going. Tell me.” He means it genuinely. “Keep going.” 

They walk further down the beach, and he doesn’t check his phone. 

He doesn’t check his messages when he turns on his phone to make sure it’s got enough charge and connectivity to call an Uber later, should he need one. He doesn’t check his phone when he follows Mariella through streets on streets on streets, or check his phone when she lets him in to her place, or check his phone when she turns out the lights, and he doesn’t even check his phone before he falls asleep that night, passed out in a sweaty tangle. 

It’s not even really morning yet when Declan wakes up. He must not have been out very long, it was barely night anymore by the time he and Mariella went to sleep. She’s still passed out beside him, slightly sticky. At some point in the night she put her tank top back on. Aisha once described him as the prototypical one night stand, blandly handsome enough to pick up at a bar, not embarrassing enough to leave a funny story behind, barely interesting enough to try to contact later, and good enough at giving head but maybe not good enough to justify keeping around longer for that person alone, if he was going to miss birthdays and post exam parties and every kind of communication like a normal human being. “Honestly, Declan, if we’d had just laid the cards out on the table that all it was was sex we could have been friends." It had never been outright stated but he had the impression they were not friends anymore. He and Mariella the nice Catalan girl from the bar have never had anything on the table but sex so that should hypothetically make it all simpler, but he vaguely remembers her asking to be made a facebook friend last night, so that might be made more complicated. Everything gets more complicated the more you live through it. He pulls himself out of bed. Mariella doesn’t wake up. 

His jeans are buzzing. Also his head is buzzing, but he’ll deal with that later. His jeans are buzzing, so he digs around for his phone, which is the real buzzing thing, along with his head, which is making everything buzz. He doesn’t drink all that much because he hates losing control, the result being that even a limited amount of alcohol will make him lose control. He sighs. He had at least several units of alcohol last night. It’s going to be the kind of nothing day you get through. His phone has at least fifty messages, but he left his reading glasses in the hotel, so they’re all gibberish. Oisín probably, certainly Oisín, the messiest of Declan’s hit list of terrible relationships in that he still thinks there’s something human and decent left in him that could hypothetically be reached and then is all the more frustrated when it can’t be. Oisín is probably handcuffing himself to an arms manufacturer’s front gate in protest right now. Declan doesn’t have it in him to call Oisín, so he’ll do it later, when the mutual guilt trip can fester a little longer. He slips his jeans back on in case one of Mariella’s roommates is up and walks into her kitchen, which is empty and painted a charming color of blue. He’s residually drunk enough that it occurs that the sunshine really is nice. Miró was on to something. He calls the most recent missed call. 

It’s not Oisín. 

“Mr O’Connor, we’ve been trying to reach you for the last eight hours.” 

“I’ve been busy,” he says, trying not to let the rush of sex and liquor slur his voice. “Who is this again?” 

“This is the office of Masters and Samuelsson, Esquires. We’ve called to inform you that your father, Niall Lynch, died on Tuesday.”

**Author's Note:**

> thoughts? comments? opinions? hit me up @tovezza  
> i have ch 2 mostly written and it's like. 10k at least probably. and ch. 3 outlined to be a similar length. if you've seen the general length of my previous work you'll know what a do that was for me. bear with me, please


End file.
